The clerk's race pits Arthur Morrell, a longtime fixture in Democratic politics who is seeking his third term in office, against Robbie Keen, an independent and a political outsider.

Keen said she is intimately familiar with the clerk's office operations. Until recently, she was director of the Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA Testing and Evidence Project, which was funded by the National Institute of Justice and tasked with organizing the clerk's evidence system, in shambles since Hurricane Katrina. As the project was moving toward a statewide focus, she said, she saw Morrell ignoring the system she put in place, so she quit to run against him.

Tuesday evening's forums, held by the Alliance for Good Government and the Orleans Parish Republican Executive Committee, threw the candidates' styles into sharp relief. Their differences can be summed up by the answers they gave to two questions at the Alliance for Good Government forum.

Each was asked to give one-word answers to the following questions:

Do clerk's office employees need government vehicles?

Should the clerk of court be elected or appointed?

Morrell said yes to both: The office does need city vehicles and the position should be elected.

Keen said no to both: Employees don't need city vehicles, and the position should be appointed.

That Keen believes the job is essentially administrative in nature should come as no surprise. During the forums, she came off as anything but a practiced politician, regularly fumbling her words and offering meandering answers to questions.

She's counting on voters seeing her as a technocrat, someone who may not be politically savvy but who knows how to operate a complex records system.

Morrell, on the other hand, positioned his willingness to step into the political fray as an asset. He pointed out that the office is funded primarily by the city and he vowed to continue to fight for enough funding to move the parish criminal courts into the 21st century. During both forums, he recalled with pride his successful battle with Mayor Mitch Landrieu over the office's funding. He said he will seek grant money to continue the modernization effort.

Keen said that isn't good enough. Some of the systems are already in place, she said; he's just not using them. As soon as the organization project began wrapping up, the record-keeping under Morrell's direction began to slide immediately, she said. "The clerk's office are the roots of the criminal justice system," Keen said. If the roots aren't healthy, the whole system falls apart, she said.

Morrell, meanwhile, touted the progress made under his administration and vowed to continue his efforts.